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This Recall thing is a prime example of how bad we are at understanding when something is a systemic problem.
It doesn't matter if *you* disable it. It doesn't matter if *you* install Linux. It doesn't matter if *you* set your computer on fire and move to a Luddite commune.
If you have *ever* sent sensitive data, no matter how securely, to another person who now has this shit enabled, and they find your data and look at it, your data is compromised, and there's nothing you can do about it.
I don't know if I believe the theories that Microsoft is being pressured to introduce this by state actors who want to be able to spy on us.
But it would be darkly funny if, after all our paranoia about secret back doors, The Man just rolled up with a bulldozer in broad daylight to install a *front* door, complete with a neon sign and a welcome mat.
@confluency It's only paranoia if the suspicions are unjustified.
And facts show that they weren't. They aren't.
@confluency I doubt they are being pressured into it (I know product managers that would be capable of introducing something this stupid).
But I can guarantee that the border control and other state actors are popping Champagne.
@simontoth Yeah, personally I suspect that this is organic stupidity from managers high on their own AI assistant hype fumes.
But the only way to fix something like this is with legislation, and I worry that governments won't try very hard to legislate against something that's so... convenient.
@confluency @simontoth That’s where lawsuits come in. Big enough corporation pointing at this and saying that it completely destroys their ability to work with sensitive information? That’ll be in court soon enough.
Whether or not it’s before most of the little guys get their info leaked is the real question.
@confluency @simontoth As in, "never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence?" (Or something like that.)
Not sure I buy that.
@confluency @simontoth I hope they realise the risk to themselves, if nothing else.
@simontoth @confluency Microsoft is getting pressured by Saudi-Arabia and the petro oil states to include "AI" / Recall, because 1. Saudi-Arabia has too much money (from selling fossil fuels) and 2. because Saudi-Arabia wants to have surveillance over their citizens/journalists. The vice president at Microsoft over AI has connections to the government of Saudi-Arabia.
@confluency Then what represents the Vogon fleet? Or Ford Prefect?
@confluency That's just what The Man does. Anyone who was paying attention to the fate of RIM and the effective encryption briefly available via Blackberry devices will remember the bulldozer.
Problems with collectively derived power can't have individual answers.
@confluency@hachyderm.io I have a theory that it's a social engineering security breach. Some people at Microsoft got together and wondered if they could actually get an absurdly insecure concept through all the processes and into product, without it being flagged and stopped, just to see if it was possible to manipulate the right people and systems.
The Big Five, including Microsoft, received a huge influx of investment dollars from the Saudis, starting in 2018.
https://english.alarabiya.net/business/technology/2018/03/31/Saudi-Crown-Prince-meets-with-Microsoft-President-Satya-Nadella
https://www.newarab.com/news/saudi-arabia-set-mammoth-40-billion-ai-fund
If you were a murderous despot, which product development would you "encourage"?
Surveillance tech.
https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-google-hand-dissident-data-to-saudi-arabia-activists-say-2023-7
https://popular.info/p/truth-without-consequences
https://www.axios.com/2020/01/23/jeff-bezos-phone-back-mbs-saudi-arabia-amazon
LLM's and AI is surveillance technology development first and foremost.
@alastair @confluency “Don’t worry, I was just PRETENDING to obliterate modern security as we know it!”
“Don’t care, it still ships tomorrow.”
@WhiteCatTamer @alastair @confluency who needs quantum computing to be able to hack non-quantum encryption? Just take pictures like you're banned from doing physically in any modern workplace.
@alastair @confluency @_L1vY_
Pretty sure that’s a conspiracy theory…
Meaning it’s highly unlikely.shrug
I think they were just thinking how they could wow folks because they have invested a fckton of money. So invest a shit ton of money make it sparkle, we can worry about security later right?
Our society is one of privledge, merit based, and capitalist based.
In other words basically a mob of people all playing the largest game of music chairs on earth. Tit for tat just my pov 
@EVDHmn@ecoevo.social @confluency@hachyderm.io @_L1vY_@mstdn.social I do think the concept is useful but I think it would require a much more sophisticated implementation and that would take a lot longer to deliver. Before the Copilot+ announcement I was anticipating that there'd be some kind of API for apps to hook into the AI Explorer and share certain specific details.
@confluency to me this appears a bit more indirectly, to normalize surveillance and let people feel it to be a helpful thing
@crazy_pony @confluency I mean, personally this would be MEGA helpful, not only for troubleshooting, but also just figuring out why / how I was doing something later, given ADHD, long covid, depression, etc.
But it's not worth the risk to everyone else's privacy and sanity. (Even if I used it perfectly, it would still exist and could be copied for someone else to use too.)
@confluency this is why I never get down with conspiracy theories. They don't hide anything, they just do it.
@confluency we try hard to avoid fear-driven reasoning and focusing too hard on unanswerable questions
with totalitarian surveillance stuff like this, it barely matters if there's human intent to make it worse. every major power structure's incentives are to make it worse, so in the absence of pushback, that's what happens.
@confluency I hadn't thought of that. Thanks for the warning!
@confluency
Hopefully this makes people think of #Windows as a pandemic biohazard. Quarantine those exposed or infected. It's the only choice if you are not yet infected yourself.
@itgrrl
@hobs @confluency @itgrrl The problem is the stuff I really want protected -- such as gov't records, medical records, and bank stuff -- is entirely on Windows no matter what I personally do 
@sidereal @hobs @confluency @itgrrl compared to being in Capita hands, windows recall is dead safe!
@Thebratdragon @sidereal @hobs @confluency @itgrrl omfg. Capita and Atos need to have years of mandatory training to learn empathy and then never have ANY control over vulnerable people ever again. Lifetime ban if they ever worked as DWP contractors. Yes, even the 'good' ones.
Little side note
The Luddites were not against technology in general, "many were willing to adapt to the mechanization of the textile industry as long as they shared in the profits. However, they watched as the productivity gains from technology enriched the capitalists, not the workers."
https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-luddites-workers
This actually is directly applicable to the #Recall desaster. Nobody would reject a good local search, as long as you (and others) remain in control of their data
@confluency This is why we must curate our friends wisely and refuse to talk about anything sensitive or personal with people who still use Windows and refuse to listen
@confluency In this light I suppose Microsoft run Linux on their systems
@confluency@hachyderm.io It's bad but I think there is a significant sense to which all of this isn't new. It's already possible to document everything someone does on a computer and its reasonable to think many of the worst abusers and actors will have already figure this out. To some extent that's the 'analogue hole', the unfixable problem of once the information is on the screen or coming out of the speakers. I wanted to understand Recall better and I set up automatic screenshotting on PC within ten minutes, and only a tray icon was visible (and easily hideable from a novice user).
So it's making a problem probably significantly worse. But it's not quite a paradigm shift, and it's worth remembering that all of those risks still exist to a lesser degree even without Windows or Recall. I would already consider my data compromised in the binary sense at that point, even though Recall is an additional vector.
Even without Recall or screenshots and with no additional software, my computer is logging all the web sites I visit, I can look up the applications I have open etc. I think though a secondary problem is not Recall itself but that they've made lots of people think about how to extract history from a computer who might just not have thought about it.
@alastair @confluency You’ve missed the storing of passwords IN PLAIN TEXT thing by Recall
@TomDB@mastodon-belgium.be @confluency@hachyderm.io I'm aware of that but my point is for example that it's already possible to do what Recall is doing, including caching text from screenshots. So I think it's important not to lose sight of the fact that this is not a totally new thing, and it may not be quite as transformative as some people fear (which if true probably also means the world was shittier to begin with).
@alastair@social.alastair87.me The problem though is that Recall isn't as secure as Microsoft make it out to be and people have already research various stuff that could happen that bad actors can collect from user that has Recall enabled. Doesn't matter if Microsoft didn't come up with the concept first and there's other variation of it, it's still concerning how easy it is to access or at least have amount of vulnerability.
I recommend checking The Linux Experince's video briefly talking about the exploit which will at least give you the idea why people are that paranoid about it.
@TomDB@mastodon-belgium.be @confluency@hachyderm.io
@TomDB@mastodon-belgium.be @confluency@hachyderm.io To be fair I'm not the person to ask about what Recall potentially enables because I'm sufficiently expert in extracting and manipulating information to do it myself (as are probably a lot of people in techie circles). It's the advertising of the vulnerability and the fact that it's now easier (setting aside the completely incompetent technical implementation).
Excellent point 
@confluency This is on my mind a lot as a non-user of Gmail. As you know, this does very little to keep my email private from Google.
@confluency@hachyderm.io
Even better is if you sent something encrypted but the recipient views it, (having bothered to encrypt it for data-in-transit and/or data-at-rest reasons) ends up mean bupkis.
@confluency it's like COVID: you can do all the prevention you want, but if others go around spreading it, you're caught in it one way or another
Been thinking about how my credit union uses Windows, and my 401K people, and my doctors who have already leaked my data 50 times, and and and...
@confluency Just for the record, I think most people wouldn't have any trouble at all understanding why this is terrible, even at the systemic level, once they understand how it works. The problem is that "we" have trouble accepting that the people in charge could possibly be so stupid or so evil.
See also:
https://hachyderm.io/@Voline@kolektiva.social/112561841976258365
@confluency this is true for emails and chat messages too.
Who has access to the messages at rest?
@confluency Thanks a lot for making this information clear. Sensitive data has to remain private! This is essential! #recall #safety
@confluency Systemic problems often lead to huge shifts.
So perhaps a huger shift to Linux will happen? Most of the time security is kinda abstract to people, but "Microsoft is screenshotting every porn you watch" might be much easier to grasp.
@chrastecky I would like to believe that, but I'm not optimistic. There's a stark difference in opinion about this between the computer-touching part of Fedi ("Look, Linux is actually very simple; here are six paragraphs explaining why you should use my favourite distro, and what might go wrong if you do, but if you just *listen*...") and the other part, which really really doesn't want to hear it.
@chrastecky I don't want to come across as condescending -- I don't think any of those people are stupid or lazy or incapable of learning. But switching isn't "free", and requires time and effort which most people do not have available.
While I hope that for at least some people this will be the final push that leads them to try out other options, that can't be the only plan, because I'm 100% confident that most people *absolutely will not do it*, and hoping that they will is magical thinking.
@confluency You don't need most, you need some critical mass.
Let's say it's 15% (just made it up, but sounds like a good number), once Linux reaches that much on desktop, it's a major player that needs to be counted with.
All the Linux issues that come down to hardware vendors will start to disappear and even more people will come over simply because Linux will simply be better for (almost) every use-case imaginable.
@confluency Recall won't probably reach this critical mass on its own, but it's a start.
Or maybe I'm wrong, but I still love watching Microsoft dig their own grave, albeit very slowly.
@chrastecky I would honestly love to believe this, but I don't.
Here's hoping it's as many people as possible, though. This is a golden opportunity for the big distros to target the Linux-curious -- but it's going to be a hard sell. Step zero is to convince people to install something *at all* instead of just using the thing that came pre-installed on their computer. For some people that is already too risky, unless they have a friend to help them.
@confluency Who today doesn't have a tech friend? But I do see your point, I'm not holding my breath, I'm just cautiously optimistic.
@chrastecky More importantly, the odds of the large institutions that already have a lot of our sensitive data abruptly switching en masse over this is basically nil. They have the manoeuvrability of megatankers. I guess the more serious ones will come up with internal policies for disabling the feature -- good luck making sure that there are no leaks in the system. In less serious organisations with poor enforcement, I fully expect employees to turn it back on, copy work to home laptops, etc..
@confluency And of course “sent sensitive data” includes having gotten blood drawn at a routine physical which leads to your doctor’s office having a whole screenshottable list of test results about your blood sugar, cholesterol, etc. You don’t even have to use the internet to have your privacy compromised.